Why Aren’t Vampires Perfect?

Here’s a thought.  Vampires have been around for hundreds of years.  Sometimes thousands.  They don’t sleep, so they have time on their hands.

They don’t eat, so they don’t spend hours of their time in the tedious preparation and consumption of food, and the endless rites and ceremonies surrounding the imbibing of food and drink that we humans have invented over the millennia.  So, they have even more time to spare, no?

They’ve parted from humans over the long term, and their emotional make-up has come adrift, so pyschologically, they’ve adapted in ways writers and readers have all sorts of fun exploring.

The thought that struck me is…why are vampires not perfect?

Why, in the hundreds or thousands of years vampires have existed, haven’t they ironed out all the human deficiencies in their character and strived for perfection?  They’ve had the time to do it; most of them have developed the means and discipline, too; and their emotional separation from human priorities and empathies means they have the bloody-mindedness necessary to reach that sort of peak in perfection that humans have aspired to and never achieved because of the limitations that dog them.

Yet writers often portray vampires as tortured souls with more than human psychologies, wrestling with emotions that are as strong, if not stronger, than those humans deal with every day, and often with less finesse than humans who have had less practice and experience than vampires who have walked the planet for at least a dozen times longer than the humans who witness the turmoil the vampire goes through.

I know one reason why writers do this:  It makes for damned fine fiction.  A vampire who has managed to hold him or herself above human emotions for decades and is suddenly thrust into the midst of feelings and is out of practice dealing with them, will most certainly handle them very badly, if at all.  The image of a two-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum springs to mind.  All that excess emotion and no clear idea how to channel it?  Super human strength and speed into the bargain.  Let me just slip out the fire exit here before the blood bath begins…

The other reason for writing fictional vampires who are less than perfect is that in romance fiction, you need a vampire who feels, if your romance is to work properly.  A vampire who has a hidden, vulnerable edge, that the heroine (or hero — let’s not be sexist!) works their way under, either intentionally or unconsciously, makes for compelling reading.  A perfect vampire would have erased that weakness centuries ago.

But it’s an interesting theory, all the same, to speculate that if a vampire was any good at all, he would have worked to make himself totally invulnerable.  He’d be close to invincible, the longer he lived.  Imagine what sort of a romance hero he’d make if the right heroine came along just at the right moment and caught him off guard, just before he was 100% invulnerable, and burrowed into his heart?  That’d be a hell of a romance to read, wouldn’t it?

Hmmmm….